Pupajim
Amplifier

Francesco Messina is perhaps best known for his collaboration with fellow composer Raul Lovisoni on the album Prati Bagnati Del Monte Analogo, originally released on seminal Italian label Cramps in 1979. Along with contemporaries Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca and Giusto Pio, Messina would help reshape the world of modern composition with an organic rawness and haunting beauty.In 1979, Messina was asked to perform at the Teatro Quartiere in Milan. As the composer writes in the liner notes, "Due to the limited availability of key technical features, it would have been too complicated to perform Prati Bagnati, and therefore I opted for these three pieces instead. We had never actually tried them all together, so I thought about renting a recording studio the previous afternoon. In that way, we could rehearse in a suitable place and use the opportunity to record the music on tape."Unreleased for over thirty years, and rediscovered thanks to Die Schachtel label (and included in their Prati Bagnati CD edition), the recordings on Reflex have an unadorned, almost improvisational feel. "Untitled" (featuring Lovisoni's plaintive flute) and "I Nuovi Pescheti" are full of meditative piano passages that lend an aura of new age, while the title track is more insistent with unfurling chords layered in real time via a reel-to-reel tape machine, resembling Steve Reich's mesmeric phase-shifting works of the '60s.A central figure within the Italian avant-garde, Francesco Messina gracefully expands his country's contribution to Minimalism. This first-time vinyl release is recommended for fans of Joanna Brouk, Luciano Cilio and Charlemagne Palestine.

An echo through the ages, channelled and tuned by Young Marco. Feelings of tactile, loved-up naivety, transferred to musical waves of colour, rhythmic energy, and hallucinatory aural visions. This is ‘I’m Still Mellow’ and the psychedelic yin to its’ yang, reverse alternative version ‘Wollem Lits M’I’.Both are imaginative 21st century takes on ‘Mellow’, a long-forgotten Amsterdam-born sub-genre of dance music that took the house template and re-imagined it for Dutch dancefloors in the early ‘90s.

On their self-titled debut album Etienne Jaumet and Fabrizio Rat, both trained pianists, re-invent their favourite instrument to make us hear it in a totally new way. While the former creates unusual sounds thanks to the rhythmic machines that accompany his piano, the latter uses this classical and romantic instrument par excellence to explore the techno sphere."The basic idea of our duo is to confront the harmonic richness of the piano and the synthesizer through rhythm. To explore our interactions through live music. To develop new atmospheres thanks to the evocative power of unusual sounds. Somewhere between ambient and sound experimentation…'

A1 131 / A2 95 / B 96